But what I see in the papers and what I'm really quite curious about is this
idea that, that people who put out, that
fracking is somehow going to make us energy independent again.
In fact, I saw one prediction from this guy right here, Mark Perry.
So, he's an economist at the university of Michigan,
and he's also a part of the American Enterprise Institute.
And then, here's another guy, Arthur Berman
who happens to be a petroleum geologist.
And so, here's two guys who took the exact same data, right?
The, the source, you know, the Energy Information Administration, so that's
the Department of Energy's, you know, factual, these are, these are things.
So, so he took this, and here's his plot
of this, so here's Mark Perry's plot of this, right?
And what he plotted was petroleum production,
the US, Saudi Arabia, and Europe, okay?
And what he shows here is that, oh, Europe's on its
way down, and here's Saudi Arabia, and here's the United States, okay?
And we passed Saudi Arabia, right?
So, this is the guy who said, based upon this projection, I'm going to
project that we're going to be energy independent,
and we'll be exporting oil by 2018.
Right, in five years.
And this got picked up by the press.
Now people instantly came out and said, hey, wait a minute, you have us
up here at 12 million barrels per day and our real number is about 6.4.
Well, how did you get this?
Well, his petroleum turned out to count every single liquid fuel we made.
Including the 13.9 billion gallons of corn ethanol.
He just added that in too.
And he added liquid fuels from fracking gas and everything he could find, right?
So you, you can say, well, he skewed it.
But, but at any rate, he, he projected this.
And people said, oh that's fantastic, we're
going to have oil that's going to go on forever.
But here's really, here's our real production, right?
Here's how much petroleum we really produce.
And yes, fracking has increased it up to there, but here's our consumption.
We're still off by nine million barrels per day, okay?
With no possibility to get there.
And the Department of Energy doesn't think we're going to get there.
Here's their projections.
Here's consumption, here's production.
They say in 2035, we're still going to have a gap at 36%.
But the one good news is that they
also projected here, what's our energy use per capita?
So, here's our energy efficiency in 2005 dollars, it's gone down since 1980.
Which means we're getting much more efficient at using energy.
And here's our actual energy use per capita.
It started to go down in 2010, mainly because the price
of oil got so high, we decided to become more efficient, right?
But here's why fracking isn't going to last forever, and
why it is certainly not going to give us energy independent.
So, this is the average production from shale gas well, right?
This happens to be fracking gas wells, and these things drop
so that they are only productive for about three years, all right?
So this enormous bolus of natural gas that we
have now will be gone in the next two years.
And the price of natural gas will go back up again to $7 or $8
a million BTU, and then we'll start
fracking again, we're not fracking for this now.
We changed fracking to oil, because the price of oil is $106, $103 a barrel today.
But the overall field production, here's fracking wells and oil wells.
And this is a very interesting analysis that,
that, this guy right here, Jay David Baker did.
What he did, was he said, well, the problem is that
the number of wells that are going in is going in exponential.
We spent last year $186 billion in oil exploration in the
United States, the largest number by $25 billion in our history, okay?
We did that because oil's $107 a barrel.
So, it's very difficult when you're putting on an enormous
numbers of new wells to tell how long they really last.
So what he did was he simply picked a point, the end of 2011.
And he said, every well that has been drilled
to that point I'm just going to keep that stable.
I'm not going to count all the new ones and then
I'm going to count productivity coming out of those existing wells.
And that's how fast the productivity drops.
That tells you what fracking gives you is a two or three year timeline on a well.
A traditional well lasts 20 years.
That's why there's no possibility that fracking is going to save us.
But this is the picture that just amazing me, okay?
This is a picture of North America at night.
And I think you, all of you will recognize, oh here's
New York, here's Dallas, here's Los Angeles and San Diego, San Francisco.
What is that, right?
That is North Dakota.
Right?
There's another one right down here, right?
That, that's the Eagle Ford Shale.
So what are those?
Here's a close up of that.
These are the number of wells drilled in the North Dakota Bakken Shale, okay?
What these are, is this is the gas that
is being flared off those at night, all right?
Now, some people view this, and say, what a great thing.
America is solving their energy problem by drilling thousands of wells.
Personally, I think what this tells you is this is a serious addiction, right?
This isn't, this isn't Charlie Sheen
addiction, this is Lindsay Lohan addiction.
>> [LAUGH].
>> This is the kind of addiction where we need intervention, okay?